


Ghosts

by LydiaBSlade



Series: Destination Unknown [11]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Military, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Angst and Porn, BenArmie AU, Brief Graphic Violence, Brief Kylo/OMC, Description of Noncon Fantasy, Dirty Talk, Eventual Happy Ending, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Masturbation, Phone Sex, Referenced Blood and Injury, Rimming, Switch/vers Kylux, Unprotected Blow Jobs, slight scar kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-12
Updated: 2019-09-12
Packaged: 2020-10-17 03:42:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20614391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LydiaBSlade/pseuds/LydiaBSlade
Summary: As a new lieutenant stationed in Korea, Hux struggles to adapt to the day-to-day tedium of life as a junior staff officer. Also, he can’t seem to stop compulsively reloading Ben Solo’s Facebook page.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: the ten previous stories in this series are locked for registered AO3 readers only, but if you’d like to read them and you don’t have an AO3 account, I’m happy to email them to you (contact me at LydiaBSlade@gmail.com).
> 
> Also, this fic is primarily Kylux, but if you don’t want to see any Hux/OMC content then you may want to skim/skip the first chapter. Please see chapter endnotes for detailed content warnings and additional information.

_Hux, I can’t meet you anymore_

_I’m sorry_

_I will miss you _

Hux stares at the small screen of his flip phone, feeling - well, not surprised, exactly. He had assumed this would happen sooner or later. And even if it hadn’t, Hux will be on the other side of the world in six months or so, most likely. But he still feels a leaden sense of disappointment, a kind of creeping internal grayness. 

The messages are from Jae-hyeon, a Korean ex-soldier whom Hux has been - perhaps not dating, but “meeting,” as Jae-hyeon had put it - for a few months now. Meeting to exchange blowjobs, mostly. Typically with a minimum of conversation. Jae-hyeon’s English is excellent and his written communications are invariably impeccable, but spending two years working with American soldiers who laughed at his accent seems to have fatally undermined his confidence in his ability to speak the language. 

As for Hux, after six months of being stationed at an American airbase just south of Seoul, he has learned to say “Hello,” “Thank you,” and “Please give me dumplings” in Korean. Those phrases reliably carry him through his interactions with the grandmotherly lady who sells him his dinner of pork and kimchi man du most evenings, but they have not proved to be especially helpful with Jae-hyeon. 

***

Hux came to Korea straight from the military-intelligence Officer Basic Course, with high hopes for his first assignment as a lieutenant. He had originally intended to become an engineer, but he had ultimately chosen intelligence instead after spending a dispiriting summer, just before his senior year at West Point, with an engineering platoon in southeast Georgia. 

Looking back on that summer, Hux still feels confident that he did exceptionally well, at least from a technical point of view. He wrote nearly the entire operations order for a company field exercise and successfully organized and ran a small-arms range for the entire battalion, both of which were accomplishments that considerably exceeded the basic standard of “learn a bit about the real Army without ending up in jail, the hospital, or the newspaper.” 

But there was no question that the soldiers in the unit greatly preferred Rose, who was assigned to an adjacent platoon. They flocked to her to talk about their divorces and child-support issues and the problems with their pay, while she listened and frowned and took diligent notes. By the second week she had already developed a reputation for turning up frequently at battalion headquarters, armed with a sense of moral outrage and highlighted copies of the relevant regulations, determined to untangle whatever paperwork snafu was contributing to her soldiers’ misery. The lieutenant whom she was supposed to be shadowing seemed mildly terrified of her. 

Not all of the attention from the soldiers was welcome: “This forty-five-year-old divorced private spent twenty minutes showing me pictures of his cute kids, and then he asked for my phone number,” Rose told Hux once, in disgust. “I told him that if he ever needed to contact me outside of work, he could reach me through my chain of command at West Point.” 

“That’s a good response,” Hux said, somewhat impressed.

“Isn’t it? I borrowed it from Clarice in _Silence of the Lambs_!”

But there was no question that Rose seemed to be flourishing. Hux, however, was bored: the soldiers were distantly polite to him, but showed no particular interest in talking to him unless they were required to do so. Meanwhile, the platoon alternated between frenzied bursts of activity and long stretches of idly cleaning gear or sitting around doing nothing in particular. West Point had led Hux to believe that these periods of “no scheduled activity” should be used for training, but when he tried to suggest some possible topics, both the lieutenant and the platoon sergeant who were supposed to be mentoring him responded with identical looks of confusion and exasperation, so he gave up. 

On the weekends, Hux’s options were even more limited: his lack of a driver’s license was much more of a handicap in Georgia than in New York. Mostly, he piled in with whatever group of cadets had managed to acquire a car, regardless of where they were going. The town just outside the base consisted of the standard military-adjacent assortment of strip clubs, pawn shops, fast food, and depressing bars, so usually they drove up to Savannah. 

Hux loved the historic district of Savannah, with its stately houses, ancient oak trees, and Civil War-related points of interest, but spending time there also felt like pressing on a bruise that had only partly healed. Years earlier, Savannah had been the farthest point of his spring-break road trip with Ben. They hadn’t quite had time to make it all the way to New Orleans, and in any case Hux had felt that it was thematically appropriate to begin concluding the trip at the endpoint of General Sherman’s March to the Sea. 

In Savannah, his interests and Ben’s had briefly converged: the cemeteries and historic sites that Hux wanted to visit were also reputed to be thickly populated with the ghosts that Ben was hoping to see. Even their hotel managed to serve both purposes, since its history as a former Civil War hospital had left it generously supplied with ghosts (although Ben had been disappointed to learn that the most haunted floors were also the most expensive, and that the ghosts usually did not deign to frequent their bargain room in a back corner). No ghosts had been in evidence, as far as they could tell, but walking through the city’s moonlit squares together, under the flickering gas lamps, had been almost embarrassingly romantic regardless.

Visiting Savannah with a group of briefly-unleashed cadets proved to be an entirely different sort of experience. No one had any interest in cemeteries or Civil War sites; they were exclusively focused on the city’s bars and nightclubs. Hux went along, having nothing better to do, but the pounding music and the miasma of cigarette smoke inside the clubs usually drove him outside fairly quickly. At least the moonlit squares were still there for him to wander through, even though he hadn’t spoken to Ben since their ill-fated Valentine’s Day together. 

On one occasion, Hux was thoroughly discomfited to find himself watching a drag show in one of the clubs with Rose and two other female cadets. Hux sat through the show in silent mortification, wondering if the girls had included him in this otherwise all-female outing because they knew about him and assumed that a drag show would naturally be of interest to him. 

After the show, when the performers stepped off the stage and slipped in among the crowd, one of them reached a long-fingered hand out to Hux and tried to coax him off the corner barstool where he was uncomfortably perched. “Dance with me, honey,” she said, looking up at him through bejeweled eyelashes. 

Hux froze in panic. “I - I can’t - I don’t - “

“He’s dancing with me,” Rose’s friend Erin said firmly, putting her arm around Hux. “Sorry.” 

The drag queen shrugged her toned bare shoulders and turned away. “Your loss,” she said, moving on.

Grateful for the rescue, Hux briefly attempted to dance with Erin, although the effort made him feel entirely uncertain about what to do with any part of his body. Erin seemed to have some ideas, however. When the music sped up, she put her hands on Hux’s hips, pulled him close, and began grinding rhythmically against him. Hux, overwhelmed with embarrassment, mumbled something about needing to use the restroom and made a beeline for the door. 

The one bright spot in the long summer turned out to be Ilya, the battalion’s intelligence officer. Ilya was a stocky, pugnacious Russian Jew whose family had fled to Brooklyn from the collapsing Soviet Union when he was a child. 

Hux first encountered Ilya outside the company headquarters on a sweltering Tuesday afternoon. Hux was sitting on a pile of sandbags, half-heartedly reading a book which had been repeatedly recommended to him as _the_ book on counterinsurgency warfare. Ilya, walking by, squinted at the title and snorted. 

“That author is an idiot,” Ilya said fiercely, stabbing his finger at the cover. “He thinks that we could have won the Vietnam War by imitating the British in Malaya. So stupid. The only thing that Malaya had in common with Vietnam is the climate.”

“I was thinking that too,” Hux said, startled. “I don’t see how we could possibly have separated the Vietnamese communists from the population the way the British did with the ethnic-Chinese communists in Malaya.”

Ilya looked pleased. “Exactly,” he said. “Why don’t you stop by my office sometime - it’s air-conditioned, and I have much better books there for you to read.”

After that, Hux spent most of his free time in Ilya’s office, arguing about military history and listening to his diatribes about the idiots he was forced to tolerate at work. With his closely-cropped reddish-brown hair, square face, and a nose that looked as if it might once have been smashed sideways in a fight, Ilya looked nothing like Ben - and, in fact, they would probably have hated each other, since Ilya was a staunch Republican who loved to deride “Westchester-liberal Jews who think the whole world will love us if only we are nice to them.” But his ferocious sarcasm, misanthropy, and periodic references to relatives in Brighton Beach were pleasantly familiar. And in the stupefying heat of the Georgia summer, where the miles of strip malls and palmetto trees sometimes made Hux feel as if he were on an alien planet, the machine-gun cadences of Ilya’s Russian-inflected Brooklyn accent sounded like home. 

Unfortunately Ilya was also exuberantly heterosexual, or at least he seemed invested in making Hux think that he was: their Monday-morning conversations invariably included a recounting of Ilya’s amorous adventures among the eligible female club-goers of the greater Savannah area. He seemed to be under the impression that local women were very impressed by the fact that he was from New York; Hux found that difficult to believe, but had no particular experience that would have allowed him to mount an effective counterargument. He generally nodded politely and waited for an opportunity to turn the conversation back to more interesting topics.

It was Ilya who strongly encouraged Hux to reconsider his plans to become an Army engineer. “Why do you want to spend your life directing idiots to build guard shacks and latrines?” Ilya asked, gesturing scornfully at the battalion plans office next door. Hux had been having some of the same thoughts himself: it was becoming painfully obvious that the kind of engineering the Army would most likely want him to do, at least as a lieutenant, was not the kind that actually interested him. “Someone like you, smart like you, you could figure out what’s really going on. You should be an intel officer.”

The commander of the engineering battalion seemed to agree, although for different reasons. When he counseled Hux and Rose on their performance at the end of the summer, Rose emerged from his office looking somewhat overwhelmed. “He was so nice,” she said, beaming, when Hux asked her how it had gone. “He says that everyone can see how much I care about soldiers and that soldiers will go anywhere and do anything for a leader like that. He says he’d love to have me in his formation in a couple of years.”

With Hux, the battalion commander had been distinctly less effusive. He praised Hux’s technical and tactical expertise and told him that he would be an excellent staff officer - not necessarily high praise in an organization that valued leadership above all and in which many officers treated staff assignments as merely a way to mark time between commands. Hux left his office feeling determined to spend his career with more congenial people, people like Ilya. 

When it came time for Hux and his classmates to choose their first post, Hux had thought that Korea seemed like a particularly fascinating place to be an intelligence officer. He remembered Ilya’s comments and had entertained hopes of being able to figure out what was “really going on” north of the DMZ. 

The reality had turned out to be somewhat less exciting. On his first day on the job, Hux reported to the battalion executive officer, his uniform perfectly pressed and his boots brushed. The new digital-camouflage uniforms and sand-colored boots were not supposed to be starched or shined - Hux disapproved of them deeply for that reason - but he had done his best. He rapped smartly on the door, marched into the office, and stood stiffly at attention to introduce himself. 

The harried-looking major behind the desk barely glanced up from his computer. “Oh good, you’re here,” he said. “We need someone to do the monthly property-book inspection. I’ll get you the forms. And stop standing at attention, you’re making me nervous.” 

“Yes sir,” Hux said, somewhat deflated. He walked out of the office with a bewildering stack of papers which, it developed, meant that he needed to hunt down dozens of mysterious pieces of equipment and ensure that they were properly accounted for. The equipment names on the list meant nothing to Hux, but fortunately they were accompanied by photographs. Hux spent a week walking around post holding up the pictures and asking if anyone knew where he could find each item, as if they were missing children on a milk carton. 

Invariably, the gear in question would turn out to be buried in a dusty CONEX full of spiderwebs and guarded by a soldier who would insist that the person who normally did the inspection just checked the box without having to see each item in person. Hux, naturally, was having none of that. If this inspection was going to be his first mission as an officer, he was going to ensure that it was done correctly.

Once the inspection was complete, Hux hoped that he could begin doing real intelligence work, but that proved to be an elusive goal. Hux soon learned that the captain who was supposed to be the primary intelligence officer had been forced to leave the job unexpectedly after he had been arrested for stabbing another soldier in the neck during a bar fight. That left Hux to learn about his new duties primarily from his assistant, a skinny nineteen-year-old private who began their second day of work together by asking Hux if he knew that Kennedy had faked the moon landing. Unfortunately for Hux, the private was also tall and red-haired, a coincidence which soon caused the other soldiers in the battalion headquarters to begin referring to the pair of them as Tweedledum and Tweedledee. 

Gradually, Hux settled into a rhythm, although most of what he had to do - managing the arms room, processing people’s clearances and travel paperwork, preparing for security inspections - seemed to him to have very little to do with analyzing North Korean activities or ensuring the ultimate defeat of Communism. His weekly “intelligence update” to the battalion commander consisted of an unclassified overview of recent world news and a report on the weather. 

Also, he learned, he was responsible for ensuring that no one used the unclassified photocopiers and paper shredders for classified material. While he was preparing for an inspection, he had to place a sign above each copier and shredder that read “LT HUX IS THE REPRODUCTION AND DESTRUCTION AUTHORITY FOR 2D BATTALION.” Hux kept one of the signs, as a kind of self-mocking souvenir. Ben would have found it amusing, he thought wistfully. But Ben was a long time ago now, on the other side of the world. 

And - there was Jae-hyeon. For a little while, anyway. Hux first encountered Jae-hyeon when he arrived at the battalion personnel office to sign in to his new unit. At the time, Hux had just begun one of his periodic phases of being determined to be celibate, usually brought on by some sort of mistake or close call.

In this case, the most recent mistake had occurred shortly after Hux’s arrival in Korea. Hux had been bussed from the Seoul airport to a U.S. Army base near the DMZ, where he would spend a week being vaccinated and receiving briefings. Most of the briefings were about what Hux was not supposed to do during his tour in Korea (abuse his spouse, drive under the influence, engage in human trafficking) and were not exciting. The soldiers in the audience quickly grew bored and began whispering to each other, but, as Hux was one of the few officers in the group, they didn’t try to speak to him. 

Hux had never expected to feel homesick - he certainly didn’t have any qualms about being more than ten thousand miles away from Brendol. But, lying on a lumpy mattress in the barracks that first night, unable to sleep because it was morning in New York, Hux felt the distance from home keenly. It was as if the invisible cord connecting him to the Upper West Side had been pulled too taut. 

It was a cool April evening. The base was quiet, except for the sound of a dog barking somewhere in the distance. Outside, the rustling trees and parked cars were covered in a fine layer of the yellow dust which, Hux had just learned, was characteristic of springtime in Korea - a mixture of sand from the Gobi Desert and industrial pollution, apparently. It gave the parking lot a sepia tint under the moonlight, like an old photograph.

Hux looked out at this scene for a long, indecisive moment, before giving in and pulling up the Craigslist M4M “Casual Encounters” page on his laptop. _That page probably doesn’t even exist in Korea,_ he told himself, as he waited for it to load. _At least not in English._

As it turned out, it did exist. Two hours later, Hux was walking briskly to the gate, trying to look as if he knew what he was doing as he attempted to follow the bewildering series of directions he had received from the owner of a tanned, muscular torso that had caught his eye on Craigslist. The gate guard looked at him curiously as he strode purposefully towards a distant complex of shining white apartment buildings, but said nothing. 

On some level, Hux had realized that anyone on English-language Craigslist who lived just outside of an American military base in Korea was likely to be a fellow soldier - the sort of person he usually regarded as off-limits. It was just too risky; the Army was a small world. But when the apartment door opened, he was nonetheless chagrined to find one of his West Point classmates - a former soccer player named Josh - staring at him with a look of bewildered recognition. 

“Hux!” Josh said. “Was it - that was you on the - “

“Yes,” Hux said shortly, feeling as if something heavy had just shattered over his head. “I’ll just go - “

“No, come in!” Josh reached out tentatively, touching Hux’s wrist. He had big hands, warm and blunt-fingered. “You can’t go back on post now anyway - it’s after curfew.”

“Fuck,” said Hux, horrified at his own stupidity. In his disorientation and loneliness he had somehow failed to connect the gate guard’s expression with the eleven P.M. curfew that he now remembered having been briefed on earlier in the day. 

“Don’t stress about it, you can stay here tonight,” Josh said, guiding him inside. He laughed suddenly. “Hux, man! Crazy running into you like this. How’ve you been?”

At least the torso in the photograph did, in fact, belong to Josh: when Josh took his shirt off, Hux recognized the fine dusting of blond hair that had made his chest appear nearly gilded in the sunlit advertisement. The fluorescent overhead light in Josh’s mostly-empty living room - “Sorry, my furniture’s all in storage at home” - cast a somewhat bleaker glow on the proceedings. But after an exchange of fumbling but rather excellent handjobs, and with Josh’s warm breathing bulk next to him, Hux found himself finally able to sleep. 

Early the next morning, Hux stumbled back onto post as soon as curfew was over; the same gate guard, still on duty from the night before, gave him a knowing, amused look as he checked Hux’s ID. 

_Never again_, Hux promised himself, as he sat through another day of administrative briefings, trying not to think about Josh’s warm hands unbuttoning his fly. _No more stupid risks._

His newfound resolve lasted long enough to allow him to reject Josh’s Facebook friend request when it popped up in his notifications later that week. But then it came time to report to his new unit. When the clerk turned around to hand him a stack of forms to fill out, Hux looked up to see broad shoulders, thick dark hair, and a soft, full mouth. With a familiar mixture of excitement and self-hatred curling up into his chest, Hux realized that Corporal Park Jae-hyeon - his full name was printed in English and Korean on his uniform - was returning his look of startled interest. He was staring at Hux, in fact, his pretty mouth slightly parted.

Hux did nothing with this information for some months: propositioning an enlisted soldier was, Hux felt, an unforgivable ethical violation, even if the Army would just as soon have expelled him for having sex with a man of more appropriate rank. But he found reasons to spend time in the personnel office regardless. And when Jae-hyeon completed his mandatory two years of service, Hux sent him a friend request on Facebook and, shortly thereafter, an invitation to meet up for coffee. 

A pair of expensive lattes in a crowded Myeongdong cafe rapidly developed into regular meetings in Jae-hyeon’s tiny studio near Seoul National University. The first time was rushed, intense. Hux was still only half out of his wet clothes - it was July, in the middle of the rainy season - when he came in Jae-hyeon’s hand, his tongue in Jae-hyeon’s soft mouth, tasting the coffee and caramel of the lattes they had been drinking. 

On subsequent occasions, they took their time. In spite of Hux’s occasional qualms about safety, he found himself unable to resist the urge to run his tongue over Jae-hyeon’s bare skin, to suck him until he came. With Hux’s mouth on him, Jae-hyeon lost his usual self-consciousness, crying out, his hips jerking helplessly, his hands in Hux’s hair. Hux would have to hold him down on the narrow bed to keep from choking on his cock. 

Still, Hux never spent the night, and he never invited Jae-hyeon back to his own marginally more spacious suite in the bachelor officers’ quarters on the airbase. The guard who was usually on duty at the gate in the evening was a friendly middle-aged Korean woman who seemed to like Hux: she had nicknamed him “Mr. Handsome” and regularly asked if he had found a girlfriend yet. She would certainly have recognized Jae-hyeon, and might have wondered what was going on if Hux had begun bringing him back onto the base. 

Jae-hyeon was studying history, and planning to go on to law school after graduation. His university studies had been interrupted by his mandatory military service and he was taking summer classes to make up for some of the lost time; eventually, he wanted to work for a multinational company that would send him all over the world. That much, Hux had learned that first day, at the coffee shop, before they ran out into the warm rain to take the subway to Jae-hyeon’s apartment building. But somehow they never got much beyond that point. 

Now, looking at Jae-hyeon’s last message - _I will miss you_ \- Hux wonders what might have happened. Had Jae-hyeon met someone else? Had the other students in his building noticed Hux’s frequent visits, and begun asking about them - or worse, mentioning them to Jae-hyeon’s parents? Hux wants to ask, but somehow it doesn’t feel as if he has the right to know. He stares at his phone. Eventually, he flips it shut without responding.

Instead, he opens his laptop and pulls up Ben’s Facebook page. 

They haven’t seen each other in years, but somehow, his memory trails Hux like a ghost. He seems almost fully present when Hux walks in certain places - in Central Park in the summer, in Midtown at Christmastime - or when other men touch Hux in certain ways. 

There are other reminders, as well. Hux has never been able to bring himself to get rid of the memory card with Ben’s pictures on them; he no longer carries it with him in his wallet, but he always makes sure that he knows exactly where it is. He finds it disturbing to actually look at the photographs now, though: Ben looks so young. 

The current, living Ben’s online presence is another matter. Hux had deleted Instant Messenger after he stopped talking to Ben, not wanting the constant reminder that Ben was only a chat window away whenever Hux woke up alone in the dead of night. But then there was Facebook, which Hux had reluctantly joined at Mitaka’s urging. Hux and Ben aren’t “friends,” but most of Ben’s profile is public: Hux has been looking at it, off and on, for years. 

There was a painful period towards the end of Hux’s time at West Point when Hux managed to temporarily stop himself from looking Ben up, because Ben seemed to be doing nothing but posting pictures of himself with a pretty blond boy. The boy had green eyes and high cheekbones and he always looked supremely happy to be sitting in Ben’s lap, or standing draped over him, or to be slung over his shoulder on the beach at Coney Island. The Coney Island pictures in particular made Hux bite down on his lower lip until it bled. 

After that, he managed to stop himself from looking for Ben online for almost a year. Then he pulled up his profile again in a moment of weakness, shortly before graduation. Hux was nearly done with his final exams, and was staring down the barrel of sixty days of post-graduation leave: he was not allowed to report early to Basic Officer Leadership training, and he had no idea how he would fill in the time. 

Half his classmates seemed to be planning to get married immediately after graduation. Even Mitaka might as well have been engaged: he had chosen to join the Quartermaster Corps specifically because logistics officers could be assigned almost anywhere and he wanted to be sure he would always be able to go where Thanisson was. Thanisson, who wanted to be a helicopter pilot, would have more limited options. After graduation, Mitaka and Thanisson were planning to backpack through Europe. Mitaka had somewhat hesitantly invited Hux to join them, but Hux had no desire to be a third wheel on what he thought of, sourly, as their honeymoon. So, once the pomp and excitement of graduation had subsided and the newly-appointed lieutenants had thrown their white hats in the air, Hux was left to spend another summer at his father’s apartment, trying mostly to be elsewhere at any time when he expected his father to be home.

Hux’s one small comfort that long summer was his discovery that the blond boy had disappeared from Ben’s Facebook account. Not only had Ben stopped posting new pictures of them together, Ben had changed his relationship status to “single,” and he seemed to have gone through his old pictures and deleted every sign of the blond boy’s existence. Hux found this gratifying, although it did at times occur to him that Ben’s thoroughness in this regard might reflect how hurt he had been by the end of this relationship. 

Otherwise Ben seemed to be doing well, from what Hux could determine. There was an exhibit of his work at a small gallery in Soho that summer - after seeing the announcement on Facebook, Hux couldn’t resist walking by it slowly, several times, during his many aimless rambles between Columbus Circle and the Bowery. He never actually went inside, but he could see most of it through the window. He thought that he might have recognized himself in two of the paintings. 

One was a wistful ink painting of a slender boy lying nude on his stomach, apparently asleep, in a twin bed by an open dormer window. Hux recognized Ben’s childhood bedroom immediately, with a pang; the boy he felt less certain about. The shades of grey and black ink made it impossible to know whether the boy’s light hair was supposed to be blond or red, and his face was turned away. His narrow hips and shoulders might have belonged either to a slightly younger version of Hux or to the boy who had just been so thoroughly deleted from Ben’s social-media accounts: Ben had a type, apparently. 

The other painting was more explicit: a large color canvas of the same boy, probably, standing over Ben with his fly open, while Ben knelt between his legs. The avid, imploring expression on Ben’s face was certainly familiar enough; it was almost unbearable to see it again, especially from the vantage point of a public street that smelled of garbage and melting asphalt. Hux decided that the standing boy, whose face was out of the frame, was definitely himself, and went straight home to download the picture from Ben’s website for more careful study. 

Ben’s website had become another trove of images that Hux looked at far more often than he would care to admit. One recent series of photographs, featuring nude self-portraits of Ben tied up in various positions, had been particularly distracting. Rendered in crisp black-and-white, the ropes outlined the planes of his body like lines of ink. He looked as though he had put on twenty or thirty pounds of muscle since Hux last saw him, and the photographs made his body look like a luxury object - something perfect and untouchable. 

If not for the unnerving softness of his face, it would be difficult for Hux to believe that the unreachable figure on the screen could be the same person who had once wanted Hux so urgently - let alone the friendly, awkward boy who had come to pull Hux out of the locker he had been shoved into on the first day of seventh grade. 

Ben - or Kylo; he seemed to be using that name exclusively now - had apparently begun doing some commercial modeling as well, mostly for obscure clothing brands that Hux had never heard of. Hux finds the photoshoots in the portfolio on Ben’s website confusing but entertaining; it’s often difficult to determine what exactly they’re advertising. In one, Ben is wearing a torn suit and frowning intensely at an aquarium full of colorful candies; in another, he is shirtless and lying partly buried in dirt, with shards of green glass covering his closed eyes. 

Admittedly, however, the photoshoot that Hux has spent the most time examining is fairly straightforward: it’s an underwear ad, featuring Ben in a sleeveless white undershirt and briefs, lying in a bathtub, looking at the camera through half-closed eyes. Under the bathwater, the white cotton is nearly transparent. A convenient shadow partly obscures his groin. In contrast to the polished surfaces and sharp outlines of Ben’s own self-portraits, this image is soft-focus, shot in a smudged black-and-white that makes his face look particularly vulnerable - almost bruised. There are deep shadows under his eyes, and his lips are dark and swollen. Hux often looks at the half-hidden bulge between his legs and imagines how Ben would groan if Hux were to press the heel of his boot down into it. 

Now, as Ben’s Facebook page loads, Hux is startled to see that his wall is covered with get-well messages from various friends. Ben doesn’t seem to have responded to any of them. Hux scans through them, alarmed - apparently Ben has been hospitalized for some reason. Hux remembers Ben’s enforced stay at his uncle’s “wellness” center in high school and wonders if something similar might have happened again - but a few people have left comments telling him that whatever he did was “awesome” and “badass,” so that seems unlikely. Had he hurt himself doing something stupid for a photograph? Or gotten into a fight?

Hux decides that, under the circumstances, it’s entirely reasonable for him to reach out to Ben to find out how he’s doing. Any old friend would do the same. 

His mouse hovers over the “Request Friend” button on Ben’s page for a long time. Eventually he clicks it, slams the laptop shut, and goes to bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings:  
\- The three-plus years that have passed since the end of Redux are briefly covered in a flashback that includes a brief description of Hux casually hooking up with an OMC and a somewhat more detailed description of a longer no-strings-attached relationship with a second OMC. There are some explicit details but no extended sex scenes. He is not in a relationship with Kylo during any of this.  
\- During this period, Hux repeatedly looks Kylo up on Facebook/the Internet and is upset at one point to learn that Kylo is dating someone else.  
\- Hux’s behavior and thoughts about Kylo are somewhat obsessive, and he’s lonely and jealous, but nothing actually crosses the line into stalking (IMO, YMMV).
> 
> Additional notes for clarity:  
\- American military units in Korea often have a small number of Korean soldiers assigned to them. Men in Korea are required to complete two years of mandatory military service, so these soldiers are typically draftees. Jae-hyeon is supposed to be one of them. It’s an aviation unit, so he’s working as a personnel clerk because he doesn’t have the training or certifications he would need to work on American helicopters.  
\- In most Army battalions, most of the soldiers and officers will have one broad specialty (such as engineering or aviation), while a smaller group of other specialists (intelligence, logistics, Human Resources, etc.) are assigned to the headquarters. 
> 
> If any of the other military references in this story are unclear or confusing, let me know and I’ll edit/add more notes.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please see endnotes for detailed content warnings.

Early the next morning, as Hux is pulling on his PT uniform, he gives in to the temptation to open his laptop and see if Ben has responded yet. 

He has. _Kylo Ren has accepted your friend request._ There are two messages. Hux opens them, his heart beating furiously. 

_Hey! Wow, long time no see._

_What are you up to these days? Still keeping the world safe for democracy?_

Hux feels momentarily light-headed. _Something like that_, he types back. _Stationed in Korea now. What have you been doing lately?_

His laptop _pings_ in response just as he starts to shut it. _Korea, wow,_ Ben has written back. _That sounds way more interesting than anything I’m doing. Mostly same old, same old. Done with art school now. Still drawing pictures of blowjobs._

Hux laughs. A moment later, another message appears. _Actually, can I call you somehow? This messenger thing sucks._

Hux looks at his watch. If he doesn’t leave immediately, he’s going to miss PT formation, but it’s optional for officers. Most days, he’s the only officer there, and he suspects strongly that the enlisted soldiers will not be even slightly distressed by his absence. _Do you have Skype?_ he types back. _I’m on there. Just look for my name._

_Yeah, good idea, give me a sec_, Ben responds. Hux waits, feeling slightly overwhelmed, for the Skype chime to begin sounding. He grabs his headphones and plugs them in: the walls in his room are thin, and he doesn’t want his neighbors to overhear this conversation.

“Hey!” Ben says when Hux answers his call. “It’s crazy we haven’t talked in so long. So what are you doing in Korea?”

The sound of Ben’s voice, with the slight New York accent that Hux had never particularly noticed when he actually lived in New York, is like a rope tossed suddenly into Hux’s hands - something strong and solid, pulling him home. “I’m stationed here with a helicopter battalion,” he says. “Near Seoul. I’m their intelligence officer.”

“Intelligence officer, huh,” Ben says, his voice sliding into a painfully familiar flirtatious register. “Would you hang up on me if I told you you can interrogate me anytime you want?”

Hux feels a sudden, dizzy rush of - something. Adrenaline, maybe. He finds himself smiling. “I see you haven’t changed,” he says. “That reminds me - are you okay? I saw all those get-well messages on your Facebook page.”

“Oh that,” Ben says, sounding tired. “Don’t worry about it, I’m fine. It wasn’t a big deal. I want to hear about Korea - do you like it there? Is the real Army everything you dreamed of?”

“Honestly, not really,” Hux says. He thinks briefly about his senior year at West Point, which had been a cavalcade of triumphs. His hydraulic spider-robot design had won a national prize that allowed him to have a prototype fabricated for further study, delighting the engineering department, and during his final semester he had been appointed a regimental commander. Nominally, at least, he had been in charge of over a thousand cadets, leading them through drill and ceremony in a plumed hat while carrying a saber. “I mean, Korea is fine. But all I do at work is paperwork and inspections. And I report on the weather once a week.”

Ben cackles. “Really, you do the weather report? Do you at least have a sexy weather-girl outfit?”

“I suppose you might think so,” Hux says. _What are we doing?_ he wonders. “It’s just my regular uniform though. And we don’t even get to wear the polished black boots anymore.”

“That’s a shame,” Ben says. “But I’m sure you’re a very authoritative, commanding weather reporter.” The flirtatious tone is definitely back. 

“My boss doesn’t seem to think so,” Hux says gloomily. “The one time it would actually have made a difference, they didn’t listen to me.”

“Yeah? What happened?”

“It was a disaster,” Hux says happily. It occurs to him that this is the first time he’s ever had anyone with whom he could properly gloat about what had happened to his battalion over the summer. “For some reason they decided it would be a good idea to plan a field exercise on an island in the middle of a river at the height of the rainy season. I did my analysis and told them the risk of flooding was too high and that I recommended postponing the exercise until fall. But the battalion commander just sighed and told me that ‘the U.S. Army is an all-weather fighting force’ and the sergeant major said, ‘If it ain’t raining, we ain’t training! Hooah!’”

“Sounds like some solid logic right there.”

“Yes, exactly. So we went out there, and it was pouring rain all day. Right before dark, after we’d finally gotten the tents up, we heard sirens going off and there was an announcement in Korean. All the Korean soldiers sat up and started talking to each other really fast. I asked them what was going on, and they said that apparently the water levels were too high and the river authorities were going to have to open the floodgates and the whole area would be underwater.”

“So they had to cancel the exercise?”

“No! I called the battalion executive officer and told him what was happening, and he told me not to worry, because ‘it might get a little wet but we won’t be in water up to our knees or anything.’ So I just finished my shift and went to set up my sleeping tent. I set it up on the highest part of the island because I didn’t want to drown.”

“Then what happened?”

“One of the soldiers came to wake me up at four AM because the whole camp was flooded except my tent,” Hux says triumphantly. “We lost twenty thousand dollars’ worth of equipment. And we couldn’t even drive off the island because the bridge was washed out. We had to be rescued by our own battalion helicopters.”

“At least you got to say ‘I told you so.’”

“Not really,” Hux says sadly. “I don’t think anyone remembered that I told them not to go. And my battalion commander ended up getting an award for quick thinking during a natural disaster.”

Ben laughs. “I guess I should’ve expected that.”

“I know, I know,” Hux says. “This is probably exactly how stupid you always thought the Army would be.”

“I would’ve figured there’d be more explosions and death, actually,” Ben says. “You just sound like everyone else I know who’s working in an entry-level job and taking orders from idiots. At least you get decent benefits, right?”

“I do,” Hux admits. “But I didn’t go to West Point just to fulfill my dream of having comprehensive dental coverage.”

“Well, maybe you should’ve,” Ben says. “I mean, I’m working like sixty hours a week at this gay bar in Brooklyn and I can barely cover food and rent. And I wouldn’t have health insurance at all if my mom weren’t paying for it.”

“You said you’re working in a bar?” 

“Yeah.”

“That just seems like an odd choice for you. Since you don’t drink, and you don’t like people.”

Ben laughs. “True,” he says. “This place is okay, though. It’s pretty chill - like, people mostly hang out and talk. Most of the time, anyway. And the owner, Joe, lets me put some of my stuff up on the walls. I’ve sold a few pieces - mostly the pictures of me naked.”

“Imagine that.”

“Yeah. They won’t let me put up any pictures where you can see my dick, though. Joe says he wants it to be clear that this isn’t a dicks-out kind of bar.”

“That must be hard for you.”

“Very hard,” Ben says solemnly. “I can send you the pictures he won’t let me put up, though. If you want.”

“Uh, yes, do that,” Hux says, opting not to mention that he has probably already been looking at them on Ben’s website for months. _So much for pretending that I was just reaching out to ask about his health_, he thinks.

“So,” Ben is saying, “it sounds like you don’t actually interrogate people at your job.”

“What? Oh, no, not even close. You need special training to do that kind of thing.”

“Want to practice on me?”

Hux laughs. “What - right now? How?”

“Just tell me what you’re going to do to me if I don’t tell you where the secret enemy base is.”

“Sounds like you already have some ideas,” Hux observes. “Why don’t you tell me? And can you turn your webcam on?”

There’s a pause. “I want to see you,” Ben says eventually. “But I don’t think the signal is strong enough for video right now.”

Hux looks at his laptop; he’s fairly certain that the signal strength is fine, and it seems unlike Ben to be camera-shy. But he isn’t in the mood to argue about it. “Okay,” he says. “So how am I going to get you to tell me about this secret base?”

“Hmm,” Ben says. “So you have me tied up, strapped to a chair. Naked.” 

“It doesn’t sound like this interrogation is in compliance with the Geneva Convention.”

Ben laughs. “Shhh. So I tell you that I’m never going to give you anything. It doesn’t matter what you do to me. You slap me across the face and tell me that I have no idea what you’re about to do to me.”

“What am I about to do to you?”

“You adjust the restraints so that they’re pulling my knees up and apart, forcing me to spread my legs,” Ben says, sounding slightly breathless. “It’s, like, a special interrogation chair.”

Hux slides a hand into his shorts, squeezing his cock. He’s been half-hard ever since Ben offered to send him nudes. “Got it, special chair. Then what?”

“So you’re in your full uniform, with leather gloves on. You pull off one glove slowly in front of my face and lube up your fingers. Then you slide them inside me.”

“Mmm,” Hux says, stroking himself slowly. “What do you do then?”

“I hate that it’s turning me on. But you’re fucking me with your fingers exactly how I like it and I can’t help it. I’m struggling, squirming, but I can’t get away, and it feels so good. My cock is so hard.”

Hux lets out a small, involuntary noise. “Fuck.”

“Yeah. You touching yourself?”

“Uh, yes. Are you?”

“Fuck, yeah,” Ben groans. “I wish you were here. You could jerk off on my face... come all over me and make me lick it up.”

“I wish I was there too,” Hux says. “Don’t stop... keep talking.”

“Yes, _sir_,” Ben says. “Uh... so you keep fucking me with your fingers until I’m practically crying, begging you to let me come. Then you tell me that you won’t let me come until I tell you what you want to know.”

Hux’s cock is throbbing in his hand. “Mmm... I’d make you keep begging for it.”

“Yeah? How are you going to do that?”

“Um... I’d slide a vibrator inside you and turn it on,” Hux says, trying to keep his voice down in case someone next door is listening. “But I wouldn’t touch your cock. Just leave you hard and aching. And I’d - _fuck_ \- I’d grab you by the hair and slide my cock into your mouth.”

“You’re so fucking hot,” Ben pants. “Yeah - you could just use me, whatever you want. Fuck my face, leave me tied up, come back later and fuck me again...”

“Your mouth would feel so good.” Hux is so close now that his fingertips are tingling. His whole body feels flushed with heat. “I still wouldn’t let you come - just keep using you - you’d be so desperate - “

“Uh-huh, yeah, so desperate that I finally break down and tell you everything you want to know - and then you reach down and squeeze my cock with your leather glove on and I come immediately, all over your glove, you make me lick up the mess I made - “

That does it. “Ah - _fuck_!” Hux sags back into his chair, panting, as the glow of his orgasm recedes. 

“It’s hot as fuck listening to you - did you just come?”

“Yes - it’s all over me - all over my chest - you make me come so hard - “ Actually Hux had come into his hand and is now wiping it on a tissue, but he’s fairly certain that this is the mental image Ben will prefer. It seems to work; he listens, pleased, as Ben gasps and whimpers through his own orgasm.

“That was so good,” Ben says, sleepily, after a moment. “Honestly, I feel better than I have in weeks.”

“Me too,” Hux says, then wonders if he shouldn’t have admitted that. He glances at the clock. “Shit - I have to go. I have to get ready for an arms-room inspection.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes, I have to go read the serial numbers of more than five hundred rifles out loud so that my assistant can make sure they’re properly catalogued.”

Ben laughs. “Sounds like a party,” he says. “Or some kind of weird religious ritual. Have fun.”

“Thanks a lot.” 

“Anytime,” Ben says. “Talk to you soon. I mean, if you want.”

“Okay - yes,” Hux says, his heart pounding, and hangs up. He scrambles out of his chair and into the shower, feeling both startlingly happy and rather like someone who has just leapt out of an airplane without a parachute.

***

Two weeks later, Hux is lying in bed, his headphones on, feeling sleepy and sated after jerking off to one of Ben’s elaborate fantasies about being kept as a pet in Hux’s room. (“It’s like a sequel to the interrogation thing,” Ben had explained. “Like, after you break me during the interrogation, you just keep me around so that you can use me for sex anytime you want.”)

On the other end of the line, Ben is quiet. Hux can faintly hear him breathing. “Ben?” he says. “I have to ask - why won’t you turn the video option on?” This has come up twice more since their first conversation. “If the signal’s not strong enough and it keeps freezing, we can just turn it off again.”

There’s a long pause on the other end. “I’d like to be able to see you,” Ben admits. “But - this has been a nice distraction lately. And I didn’t want you to say anything about my face.”

Hux feels a stab of alarm, mixed with irritation. “Why would I say something about your face? What’s going on?”

Ben sighs. “I didn’t want to tell you,” he says, “but - well, I got slashed across the face by this crazy guy at the bar a few weeks ago. It looks really bad.”

“Are you serious?” Hux says. “What happened?”

“I was trying to break up a fight,” Ben says. “Like, it’s just this quiet neighborhood place, we don’t have a bouncer or anything, and the only other bartender who was there is this dude who weighs like ninety pounds. Anyway, I didn’t see how it started, but I heard a crash and yelling and when I came out of the back this guy in a stupid hat had smashed a beer bottle and was waving it at another dude.”

“Oh no.”

“Yeah, so, I yelled at him to drop it, and he ignored me, so I tried to, like, tackle him and wrap a tablecloth around him so that he couldn’t cut anyone.”

“A tablecloth?” Hux says incredulously. “That was your weapon?”

“Shut up! I knew you’d be a dick about this. Anyway, yeah, he was way faster than I thought he was going to be and he slashed me across the face with the bottle. It didn’t even hurt at first, it was weird. I just felt this warm liquid dripping down my face and my first thought was that he had spilled something on me.” Ben takes a deep breath. “Then I looked up at the other bartender and he started screaming. The guy who cut me ducked out and ran away. And I saw my reflection behind the bar and it was just, like, all blood. Like a sheet of blood pouring down my face.”

“Oh God,” Hux says. “Are your eyes okay? Can you see?”

“Yeah, I can see,” Ben says gloomily. “I got lucky, people keep telling me. He got me across my cheek and my nose and my forehead, but he missed my eyes. I had so much blood in my eye at first, though, I wasn’t even sure.”

“Ben,” Hux says firmly, “can you please just turn your camera on and let me look at you? I’m going to imagine this as worse than it is if you don’t.”

“I don’t want you to see me like this. Just look at the pictures I sent you.”

Hux has been looking at them; he has them virtually memorized, in fact. “Ben, we’ve been at war for seven years now. There’s a guy in my unit who had half his face blown off by an IED in Iraq. I can handle seeing a cut.”

“That’s not the point.”

Hux breathes out slowly. “Ben - it’s been a long time. I want to see you.” Admitting that much, especially when he’s not just about to come, feels like stepping off a precipice, trusting in the thin air to somehow hold him up.

Ben makes a small, unhappy noise. “All right, fine,” he says reluctantly. The camera icon turns on and the screen begins spinning, trying to load. “But try not to be an asshole about it. I already know I look like shit and that I was an idiot, you don’t need to tell me.” 

Hux holds his breath as a grainy, pixelated image of Ben slowly comes into view, then abruptly sharpens. He’s sitting hunched forward, shirtless; even after seeing so many photos, it’s still startling to see how much bigger and more muscular he is than the boy that Hux remembers. Hux’s fingers curl involuntarily, aching to slide over Ben’s bare skin. But Ben also looks tired and wary. His jaw is scruffy with stubble. The slash mark cuts diagonally across his face, a dark seam with puffy red edges, like Halloween fright makeup. 

Hux wonders if he should tell Ben what he’s really thinking, or if it will come across as weird. “It’s not that bad, really,” he says. 

Ben rolls his eyes disbelievingly. “I think this is the first time you’ve ever lied to make me feel better. So much for my modeling career, right?”

“It - you’ve been modeling?” Hux remembers at the last moment that he has no intention of ever admitting that he’s repeatedly jerked off to Ben’s underwear ad. 

“Yeah, some. Surprisingly, not in porn.” He grins briefly. “I mean, nothing huge, but I’ve gotten some jobs and I was hoping it might lead somewhere. But so much for that.”

“I don’t know about that,” Hux says. “I’m sure there are some clients who would think you look interesting like this.”

“Hux, honestly,” Ben says, exasperated, “just stop. I appreciate that you’re trying not to be a dick for once in your life, but listening to you pretend everything is okay is actually worse.”

“Fuck off, I’m not pretending anything,” Hux says indignantly. “Honestly, I - I think it’s hot, actually.”

Ben laughs. “You think it’s hot? This scar? Are you serious?”

“I - yes. Is that the asshole response you were looking for?”

“No!” He’s still laughing, shaking his head. “I just wasn’t expecting that. My mom keeps telling me it’s going to be fine and that it’s going to heal really well but she also looks like she’s going to cry every time she sees it.”

“She’s your mother. It would be really weird if she thought your scar was hot.”

“Yeah, true. My dad seems pretty okay with it; I think it’s the first time I’ve done anything dumb enough to actually seem like his son. Anyway, what about you? Turn your camera on already!”

Hux yanks his shirt on, always self-conscious about how slight he is compared to Ben. He sits up and runs his fingers through his hair. Then he turns the camera on. “Is that better?”

“Much,” Ben says, smiling lopsidedly at him. “You look hot, too. You always do. I’m really happy that your job is boring and you’re not going to get your face blown off.”

Hux rolls his eyes, trying not to look pleased. “Thanks.”

“I wish I could reach out and touch you,” Ben says intensely, leaning closer to the camera. “Did you really mean it - you like the way I look now? You aren’t just trying to make me feel better?”

“Like you said, when have I ever done that?” Ben laughs, acknowledging the point. “And - I know it’s weird, but yes. You look - I don’t know, more intimidating now. Like I want you to hold me down and fuck me.”

“I will,” Ben promises. “Just call me when you get back to the city. I’ll bend you over every piece of furniture I own.”

Hux’s cock jerks against his thigh. “I might take you up on that.”

“You definitely should,” Ben says, eyeing Hux hungrily now. “Actually, can you stand up and bend over right now? I need to, like, mentally prepare myself. For everything I want to do to you next time I see you.”

Hux rolls his eyes, but complies, kneeling on the bed and looking at the camera over his shoulder. “Like this?”

“Yeah,” Ben says throatily. “Perfect. Can you pull your shorts down, though? Please?”

“Only if you get your cock out for me.” 

Ben groans and stands up, so that his webcam is level with his half-hard cock. He curls his hand around it, stroking it slowly. “I don’t know if I can get it up again, though. I came really hard like twenty minutes ago.”

“Is this helping?” Hux inquires, slowly pushing down the waistband of his shorts with his thumbs. He feels absurd and self-conscious in this position, but he likes the way Ben is looking at him. 

“Fuck, yeah,” Ben says appreciatively. “That makes everything better.”

***

“So,” Ben says casually, one evening in November, “my mother told me she wants to buy me plane tickets for Christmas. So I can go somewhere fun. She said she was telling me now in case I want to use them before Christmas.”

“That was nice of her,” Hux says, warily. 

“Yeah. So, uh. If I flew to Seoul, I couldn’t stay with you, right? Because you’re, like, in the barracks or whatever there?”

“I’m in the bachelor officers’ quarters, not the barracks,” Hux says, trying not to sound too excited. He tries to remind himself of some of the many reasons why it would be a terrible idea for Ben to come and visit him. 

“Okay,” Ben says. “For those of us who don’t speak Army, does that mean you’re allowed to have visitors? And, like, would you even want me to come see you?”

Hux bites down painfully on the inside of his cheek. “Yes - I mean, I am. Allowed to have visitors. Do _you_ want to come?”

“I mean, sure,” Ben says. “I’ve never been to Seoul; it sounds really cool. And, you know, I wouldn’t mind seeing you too.” Hux raises an eyebrow at him. “As much fun as it is watching you jerk off on Skype, I kind of miss the real thing sometimes, you know?”

Hux finds himself smiling, somewhat against his will. “I have a lot of leave days saved up, actually,” he says. “I could take some time off while you’re here - I haven’t really seen much of the country. I’ve only been on the DMZ tour up north and gone to Seoul to see the Korean War Memorial.”

“Perfect,” Ben says. “That means you’ve already done that stuff and you don’t need to drag me into it. So we can go see actual fun things instead.”

“Those were fun,” Hux insists. “Anyway, I don’t know if Korea has your brand of fun things. I don’t think there are any ghosts or vampires here.”

“You’ve obviously never seen a Korean horror movie,” Ben says. “Leave it to me - I bet we can dig up all kinds of ghosts.” 

***

“Actually there don’t seem to be quite as many haunted places in Korea as I expected,” Ben reports the next day. “I found some, though.”

“Oh no,” Hux says, “like what?”

“Well, there’s this former psychiatric hospital that’s supposed to be very haunted. But then I was googling it and Google says that nothing very scary actually happened there - it just got shut down because of problems with the sewage disposal system.”

Hux laughs. “Please tell me that’s not where you want to go on your first trip to Korea. An old hospital with a malfunctioning sewer system? Really?”

“Okay fine, we can skip that one,” Ben says. “Then I saw an article that said that Jeju is the most haunted place in Korea, but it looks like it’s really far from where you live.”

“Yes, it’s an island off the south coast, we’d have to fly there,” Hux says. “And I don’t know if Jeju is haunted in the way that you’re looking for. They might describe it that way because there were mass killings there of people suspected of being communist sympathizers. During the Korean War and afterwards.”

“Oh,” Ben says, sounding somewhat chastened. “So you mean we probably shouldn’t show up there and be like, ‘Hi, we’re two random white guys, please show us all the most terrible parts of your history for our amusement?’”

“Probably not.” Hux decides not to mention that Jeju is also famous as a romantic honeymoon destination, at least for an older generation of Koreans; Jae-hyeon had had a picture in his room of his parents there, shortly after their wedding in the 1980s. Hux would rather have his fingernails pulled out slowly than say anything to Ben that might imply that Hux expects anything more from this visit than sex and a few days of being dragged around Seoul. 

“Okay, never mind about Jeju. What about Sinchon? It’s a neighborhood in Seoul - do you know where it is?”

“Not really. What’s there?”

“Apparently they have a restaurant with a haunted bathroom.”

Hux laughs. “I assume this restaurant also serves food?”

“I mean, sure. Why?”

“Because that one I can do,” Hux says. “I’ll enjoy my dinner, and you can lurk in the bathroom and look for ghosts.”

“You got it,” Ben says. “I’ll even buy you dinner.”

***

“You know what I was thinking about on the plane?” Ben whispers in Hux’s ear. 

Hux glances around nervously. They’re on the subway, rattling their way through a tunnel on the long ride from the airport back to the base where Hux works. “Do I want to know?”

“Yes, you do.”

“Okay. What?”

“I was thinking about how hot you would look in a kilt.”

Hux laughs. “Really? That’s not quite what I was expecting.”

“No?” Hux’s trenchcoat is neatly draped over his lap; Ben surreptitiously slides his hand under it, squeezing Hux’s thigh. His breath is hot in Hux’s ear. “A kilt with nothing underneath, so I could grope you and feel your bare skin whenever I want. Stroke your cock. Or grab you and pull you into my lap in public, let you feel me getting hard against your ass.”

Hux squirms in the plastic seat. He really should push Ben’s hand away, but Ben’s fingers are almost brushing his fly now and it’s difficult to concentrate. “Don’t get me hard,” he whispers back. 

“Why not?”

“Not here.”

“It’s just payback,” Ben says under his breath. “I’ve been half-hard ever since I saw you at the airport. Your ass looks amazing in those pants.”

Hux flushes, pleased. He’s wearing his usual dress shirt and slacks, but he had, in fact, taken particular care to select an outfit that he felt was tailored in an especially flattering way. And although he’s been anticipating this visit for weeks, he was still unprepared for the quiet shockwave of seeing Ben scowling at the crowd outside the customs checkpoint, his white face bisected by the still-livid pink scar, his big shoulders hunched under an enormous backpack. It was as if Hux’s months - years, really - of fantasies had suddenly come to life and brought luggage. 

Now Ben’s fingertips are lightly feeling their way up and down the ridge of his rapidly-stiffening cock. “_Stop_,” Hux hisses, elbowing him. “I’m not going to be able to walk out of here.”

Ben laughs and pulls his hand back, but only slightly. “Poor Hux,” he says softly. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to just leave you like this, all hard and needy and unsatisfied. As soon as we get somewhere private I’m going to suck your pretty cock until you scream.”

Hux squeezes his eyes shut and counts to ten, his erection throbbing. _I’m not a teenager anymore, how does he still do this to me_, he thinks. With an effort of will, he moves into the next seat, farther away from Ben. Away from Ben’s inquisitive fingers and the warm pressure of his thigh against Hux’s and the achingly familiar scent of his skin and hair. “So,” Hux says after a moment, trying to sound normal, “what do you want to see first in Seoul?”

“I think I just told you,” Ben says, smirking at him. “But aside from that, and the haunted bathroom, there’s a bunch of art museums I’d like to check out.”

“Oh no,” Hux sighs. “I was afraid you’d say that.”

“I’ll make it up to you,” Ben promises, looking sideways at Hux, flirtatiously. “And if it’s okay with you, there’s this place down south called Gyeongju that I’d like to go visit.” He reaches into his backpack and pulls out a Lonely Planet guide, flipping it open to a marked page. “This says it has ‘more tombs, temples, rock carvings, pagodas, Buddhist statuary and palace ruins than any other place in South Korea.’”

“Wonderful,” Hux says sarcastically. “I can’t wait.”

“I figured you’d say that,” Ben says, laughing. “And we can stay in a traditional _hanok_ house. I found a haunted one for us, even.”

Hux rolls his eyes. “Of course you did,” he says. “I’ve been to a _hanok_ village before - my unit went to one for a cultural day. I don’t know why you think it’s going to be a spooky gothic experience.”

“Why, what was it like?”

“It was basically like a Korean version of colonial Williamsburg,” Hux says. “There were people doing traditional dances and demonstrating how to use nineteenth-century farming equipment. And you could have your picture taken in a Korean royal wedding outfit.”

“Did you do that?”

“No. Of course not.”

“We’ll have to fix that in Gyeongju,” Ben says, sliding over to sit in the seat next to Hux again. “I bet you’d look adorable dressed as a royal bride.” Hux glares at him. “Look, it’s your cute angry nose twitch! I haven’t seen that in a long time.” Hux elbows him sharply in the ribs. Ben laughs and half-tackles him against the back of his seat, wrapping his arms tightly around Hux, pressing his big nose into Hux’s neck.

“_Ben_,” Hux says warningly. Over the top of Ben’s head, he sees that an elderly man in a nearby seat is staring at them, unmoving, his face frozen in an expression of angry disapproval. Hux squirms, but Ben’s arms are locked around him like a straitjacket. He can feel Ben breathing against his throat.

“You know, I’ve really missed you,” Ben says, so muffled in Hux’s neck that Hux isn’t sure he heard him correctly. But he finds that he can’t quite bring himself to shove Ben away.

***  
Ben is on him as soon as they’re mostly through the door of Hux’s room, pressing his tongue into Hux’s mouth, pushing him against the wall with his hips. Ben’s mouth has a sharp, minty taste, as if he had made a point of using mouthwash before coming out of the airport to meet Hux. Ben’s hands are under Hux’s coat, squeezing his ass, grinding their cocks together through their clothes, making Hux gasp for air. Hux himself is trying to touch as much of Ben as possible, sliding his hands over Ben’s shoulders and chest, pushing up his shirt, desperate to feel his bare skin. 

It doesn’t last very long. Hux still has his coat on when Ben drops to his knees and yanks down Hux’s zipper, sucking Hux hard and fast, massaging the spot behind his balls with fingers that still remember exactly how Hux likes to be touched. Ben groans around his cock, and Hux looks down to see that Ben has got his own fly open and is stroking himself off as Hux thrusts into his mouth. 

Hux comes hard down Ben’s throat with one hand clenched in Ben’s hair and the other pressed to his own mouth, trying not to make any sounds that his neighbors might overhear. When he kneels down to return the favor, Ben is already so close that he comes almost as soon as Hux’s lips touch his cock, his come spilling hotly over Hux’s cheeks and chin. “Sorry,” he mutters, reaching for Hux, as Hux sputters and wipes at his face with both hands. “You’re just - fuck, I can’t control myself around you.”

“It’s okay,” Hux says, grimacing slightly as he notices that some has stained his coat. “I just - I’ll be right back.” 

When Hux comes out of the bathroom, having taken a quick shower and mostly restored his coat, he finds Ben standing in front of his open closet door, looking delighted. “Hey!” Ben says. “I was looking for a place to hang up some of my stuff, and I found your purple velvet bathrobe from when you were a cadet! I never got to see it before.”

“Oh that,” Hux says, bemused. “Right, I forgot I told you about that. I’ve still got most of my cadet uniforms here; I don’t really know what to do with them.”

“I have some ideas,” Ben says, looking pleased with himself. “But can you put on the bathrobe? I really want to see you in it.”

Hux rolls his eyes. “Sure, I suppose. Why not?” He slides the bathrobe on over his shoulders and hangs his damp towel on a hook. The velvet is somewhat faded now, its original lavender muted almost to grey, but the fabric is still soft. He looks down at the West Point crest on the breast pocket, feeling oddly out of time. Ben is running his fingers over Hux’s lapels, feeling the nap of the fabric and the gold piping at the edges. 

“You look perfect like this,” Ben says enthusiastically, reaching into his backpack. “Can I take a picture of you?”

“You’re so strange,” Hux says, but he’s smiling. “If you want. Just don’t post it anywhere. And give me a minute to fix my hair.”

“No, leave your hair alone! It looks so much better like this, when it’s soft and hanging into your face. Just leave it!”

Hux makes a face. “If you insist.”

“I do.” Ben snaps a few pictures, then looks around the room. “Actually, can you sit on the couch? And is it okay if I sketch you? I really want to paint this when I get home.”

“You’re going to paint me?” Hux asks uneasily. “Don’t show my face.”

“I won’t post it anywhere, I promise. And it’s not like anyone’s beating down the door to buy my paintings. I just really want to do a proper portrait of you finally.”

“And it has to be in this bathrobe? With my hair like this?”

“Yes. You look hot. Trust me.” Ben scrambles to drag the couch toward the window, pulling up the blinds. “Okay, great. Sit right there, with the light on your face.”

Hux sits down, uncomfortably. He crosses his legs, then uncrosses them. Ben is still taking pictures. The robe falls slightly open, over his thighs; he pulls it closed. Ben darts over and tugs it open again. Hux glares at him.

“Perfect!” Ben says, taking another picture. “That’s exactly the expression I want to paint.”

“What, me looking pissed at you with my clothes falling off?”

“Exactly, yeah.” Ben steps back and pulls a sketchbook out of his bag. “Just stay like that a little longer.”

Hux relaxes fractionally as he watches Ben work. Ben is sitting on the floor now, hunched over his sketchbook, his dark hair hanging into his face. The pencil looks tiny in his big hand. When he looks up at Hux, biting into his full lower lip as he concentrates, Hux feels the intensity of his stare like a touch. 

“I hope you’re not going to paint this ugly sofa in, too,” Hux remarks, after a few minutes. The couch he’s sitting on is government-issued, patterned in tiny green flowers, and made of a stiff fabric that feels as if it should be wipe-clean but isn’t. “I don’t want it in my portrait.”

“No,” Ben says, frowning at his sketchbook. He turns the page and starts a second version. “I think I’m going to use my mom’s living room, with the antique sofa and the big windows, as the background. I want it to have kind of a Weimar Republic feeling - that seems appropriate for you.”

Hux raises an eyebrow. “What’s that supposed to mean? That looking at me in a bathrobe makes you feel as if the Nazis are about to take over?”

“No! There’s just, like, a bunch of portraits I’ve seen from that period that are really erotic and beautiful but you also feel like something terrible is about to happen. That’s like you.”

“Oh thanks,” Hux says. “I’m so glad to hear that I remind you of the imminent collapse of democracy. But in a sexy way.” 

“Exactly,” Ben says, “take it as a compliment.”

Hux rolls his eyes but says nothing. The room is perpetually overheated - one of Hux’s minor life goals is to someday live in a space where he can control the thermostat, something which neither his father nor the military has ever allowed him to do - and Hux, who has been nervously anticipating Ben’s arrival, has barely slept. He finds himself dozing off in the patch of sunlight from the window, like a cat.

He wakes up when Ben puts his head in his lap. Ben is sitting on the floor between his legs, his arms looped loosely around Hux. His thick hair is silky against Hux’s bare thighs. He peers up at Hux, smiling. “Hey, sleeping beauty,” he says. 

“Don’t call me that,” Hux says, but without any real heat. He reaches out to stroke Ben’s hair. The slashmark across his face is no longer swollen, and it’s the same deep pink color as his lips. “Ben - can I touch it? Your scar?”

Ben blinks. “If you want. Just be gentle.”

Hux runs his fingers lightly over the mark. The healing skin is warm under his fingertips and feels almost unnaturally smooth. Ben shivers slightly at the touch. “Sorry, am I hurting you?”

“No,” Ben says, turning his head to kiss Hux’s palm. “It feels good, actually. Your hands are cool.”

Hux brushes the line of it with his fingers one more time, then bends forward to press his lips against it, kissing Ben’s forehead, the bridge of his nose, his cheekbone, feeling the seam of the scar against his mouth. He thinks about running his tongue over it, and his cock jerks under his robe. Ben tilts his face up to catch Hux’s mouth with his own, nibbling at Hux’s lower lip. “So it really doesn’t bother you?” Ben asks softly. “You really think I look okay?”

“I told you,” Hux says. “You look like - like I want you to fuck me. Hard.”

Ben grins. “I can do that. You want it right now?”

Hux swallows. “Yes.” _I’ve been wanting it. For years._ Hux has no intention of telling Ben that Ben is still the only person he’s let fuck him, the only person he’s ever trusted in this very specific way. He certainly would never have allowed himself to be so vulnerable with his Craigslist strangers, and he hadn’t known how to even begin to broach the subject with Jae-hyeon. 

Now, Ben hums happily as he presses his face against Hux’s thighs, nosing his way under Hux’s robe. The stubble along his jaw prickles at the thin skin, making Hux squirm. “Mmm, your skin is so soft here,” he sighs, pushing Hux’s legs farther apart with his hands. Hux shivers, sliding his hands into Ben’s hair as Ben nibbles and licks his way along his inner thighs, towards Hux’s rapidly-stiffening cock.

“Put your legs over my shoulders,” Ben urges, “lie back - let me make you feel good - mmm, like that.” Hux lets out an undignified squeak as Ben mouths at his balls, rolling them gently against his tongue. Hux is sprawled out on the couch now, his robe open, his cock stiff and red and standing up between his legs. He feels exposed, laid bare, like a meal spread out for Ben to consume. 

Hux clenches his thighs involuntarily around Ben’s head as Ben’s mouth moves lower, his back arching. He hasn’t had this, either, in such a long time - and Ben is so good at this, his hot tongue circling and teasing and finally sliding _into_ Hux, making Hux cry out helplessly, covering his face with his hands to muffle the sound. By the time Ben pulls away to get lube and a condom out of his bag, Hux is nearly incoherent, panting, his painfully-hard cock dripping onto his stomach. 

“Is this what you’ve been wanting?” Ben asks, coming back and kneeling by the couch again, teasing Hux with the tip of his lubed-up finger. Hux squirms frantically, trying to bear down on it, wanting Ben to fuck him now, immediately, hard. “Did you miss me?”

“No - yes - will you get your cock out already, _please_ \- “

“Well, when you put it like that,” Ben says, his face flushed, “but I don’t want to hurt you, you’re so tight - “ Hux arches his back and clamps both hands over his mouth as Ben’s thick finger finds his prostate. “You like that?”

“You know I do - stop teasing me - “

“I would never,” Ben says, grinning. He leans down to lick the dripping head of Hux’s cock, moving his finger in little circles inside Hux, hot and sweet, making Hux whine deep in his throat. “Tell me what you want.”

“I told you, I want you to fuck me, I want your cock - “

“Yeah?” Ben is panting now, pulling out his finger and reaching for his fly. He stands up, leaning one knee on the couch, stroking himself as Hux eyes him hungrily. He rips open a condom and rolls it on, then lifts Hux’s hips, spreading him open with both hands, lining up the head of his cock. “You miss this? You miss how I make you feel?”

Hux doesn’t answer. His eyes are squeezed shut and he’s taking deep breaths, folded nearly in half, trying to relax around the pressure as Ben slides deeper. Then - “Oh, _fuck_,” he whimpers as the burn of Ben’s thick cock inside him melts into a radiating heat. Ben groans deeply, bottoming out and then freezing in place, his thumbs digging into Hux’s hips. Hux’s heels scrabble at Ben’s back. “_Ben_ \- please - “ 

Ben starts to move, thrusting deeper and harder, his breath coming in little sobs. “That’s it? That’s what you need?”

“_Yes_,” Hux pants, “that’s it.”

***

“I blame you entirely for this,” Hux says, several days later, trying to find a comfortable position to sleep in. 

They’re in Gyeongju, in the traditional house that Ben had picked out for them to stay in. After a three-hour train ride and a long afternoon of hiking through the frigid December sunshine to see ancient Korean tombs, Hux had been less than pleased to discover that their room had no bed, or even a futon - only thin blankets to spread on the heated floor. Admittedly, the warmth feels good under his back, but the floor is very hard.

Ben is laughing. “Aren’t you supposed to be the soldier here? Didn’t you tell me you’d been trained to sleep anywhere?”

“Even in the field I have a bedroll that’s softer than this! I would’ve brought it if I’d known we were going to be camping on the floor of someone’s grandmother’s house.” Hux turns over onto his stomach, resting his face on his arms. The points of his hips dig uncomfortably into the floor. 

“I’m actually okay sleeping like this,” Ben insists. “I just need more of a pillow.” He rolls over and reaches for Hux, squirming sideways until he’s resting his head on Hux’s ass. “Mmm, I’m good now. Totally comfortable.”

Hux bucks his hips to throw him off. “Not a chance,” he says. “You picked this place, so I get to use you as a pillow. Not the other way around.” He shoves Ben down onto his back, then curls against his side, resting his head on Ben’s chest. “I suppose this is okay.”

“It is,” Ben agrees, wrapping an arm around him and pulling a blanket over them both. 

“I still can’t believe I let you choose where we’d be staying. Next time I’m vetoing any place that doesn’t have furniture. And a real shower.”

“Don’t complain,” Ben says drowsily. “Admit it, you liked making me bathe you.”

“Hmmph.” Hux had been especially unhappy, after their hike, to discover that their small bathroom was equipped only with a toilet, a drain, a tap, a large plastic bucket, and a selection of frayed washcloths. However, it had been unexpectedly pleasant to let Ben scrub him with a soapy washcloth and massage shampoo through his hair, before gently tipping the bucket of hot water over his head. Especially since Ben had finished off by pressing Hux up against the wall and kneeling down behind him to stroke him and lick into him until Hux came in his hand. 

“That’s just how you are,” Ben is saying now. “You always complain whenever I try to get you to try anything new, but then you end up enjoying it.”

“Not always,” Hux says, thinking of all the temples, museums, and allegedly haunted alleyways he has been required to visit over the past few days. 

“Well, most of the time. Like, you were so suspicious of the raw marinated crab place, but then you really liked it.”

“I suppose,” Hux admits. Hux had, in fact, been deeply dubious when Ben told him that they needed to go to Insadong to find this special delicacy - not only because he thought that eating raw crab sounded like a terrible idea, but also because Insadong had been repeatedly recommended to him as the best place to buy Korean handicrafts and gifts for loved ones at home. Having no interest in handicrafts and no one to buy gifts for, Hux had made up his mind to avoid it. 

But in the cold December evening, with Ben chattering enthusiastically next to him, the lights and warmth of Insadong’s jumble of crowded shops and galleries and restaurants had been surprisingly charming. Hux had allowed Ben to buy him honey candy from a street vendor and had been relatively patient while Ben haggled over a colorful framed textile that he wanted to buy for his mother. And the raw crab had been delicious. 

“And, like, sex,” Ben says. “I mean, I’m sure you would’ve figured it out without me eventually, but pretty much everything you really like now is something that you initially thought I was crazy for wanting to do.”

“Yes, well,” Hux starts to say, somewhat irritably, then stops. He doesn’t particularly appreciate the reminder that all his first times were with Ben, especially since the reverse is not even close to true. 

“Like me eating you out. You can’t get enough of it now, but you acted like I was nuts when I first tried it.”

Hux remembers that first experience in detail and is fairly certain that he didn’t actually object at all, but he has no intention of stroking Ben’s ego by pointing out how impossible it’s always been for him to resist having Ben’s mouth on him. “Fine,” he snaps. “You were right about rimming and about eating raw crab, but this floor is still really hard.”

Ben laughs and pulls Hux more fully on top of him. “Is that better?”

“Maybe.”

“Then go to sleep and stop complaining. And try not to knee me in the balls during the night.”

“If I do I’ll just blame it on the ghosts,” Hux says. The air in their room is icy, but under the quilt, with Ben’s arms around him and the heated floor beneath them, Hux feels cocooned in warmth. “You’ll finally get to have the terrifying paranormal encounter you’ve always wanted.”

“Shhh,” Ben says, kissing the top of his head.

***

At the end of the week, Hux accompanies Ben on the long train ride back to the airport, ostensibly because Ben needs his help to transport the various large and awkwardly-shaped souvenirs he has acquired. Both of them are rather silent. At some point, Ben nods off to sleep, his head heavy and warm on Hux’s shoulder. Hux feels hollowed-out, scraped raw by the reality of Ben’s imminent departure. 

Just outside the security checkpoint at the airport, they look at each other for a long moment. Ben reaches out tentatively to touch Hux’s elbow. “Well,” he says, “you know how to reach me.”

“I do,” Hux agrees. 

“And,” Ben says, lowering his voice and leaning in, “you know, you don’t have to only call me when you want to get off. You can just call me to complain about work or, like, tell me facts about the Civil War. I mean, I might put you on mute for that one, but I’ll still enjoy watching you talk.”

“Shut up,” Hux says, not trusting himself to say more. Ben is close enough now that Hux can smell the warm scent of him. He gives into impulse and wraps his arms tightly around Ben, pressing his face into the soft cotton of Ben’s black hoodie. Ben lets out a startled _oof_ and hugs him back, his big hands coming up to stroke Hux’s shoulders and hair. Hux takes a deep breath, trying to hold on. Eventually, he shoves gently at Ben’s shoulders, pushing him away. “Don’t miss your flight.”

“Yeah.” Ben looks at him wistfully, then turns towards the gate. “Well - see you around.”

“See you,” Hux says. He stands with his hands in his pockets, watching, until Ben’s dark head disappears into the crowd.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Noncon Fantasy: over the phone, Ben describes a fantasy about being interrogated and forced to submit to Hux sexually. None of this actually happens and the phone sex itself is consensual.  
\- Violence/Blood/Injury: Ben describes how he got his scar (in this AU, he was slashed across the face with a broken bottle when he tried to break up a bar fight). He talks in some detail about how much it bled at first.  
\- Slight Scar Kink: Hux thinks Ben’s scar is hot and tells him so. When they meet up he touches it, kisses it, and thinks about licking it, but that’s it.  
\- They have sex - pretty standard and non-upsetting, I think. Hux bottoms this time. 
> 
> I selected “chose not to put archive warnings” because I didn’t think any of this really rose to the level of requiring an archive warning for noncon or graphic violence, but let me know if you disagree, or if you feel there need to be additional tags. 
> 
> Thank you all so much for all your kind comments and kudos! I really can’t tell you how much I appreciate it, especially from everyone who’s stuck with me after all the angst in the last two chapters. I’m planning two or three more chapters before we get to the happy ending I’ve been promising, but we’ll get there!


End file.
